


Kind Stranger

by crossingwinter



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: (Ish) - Freeform, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, In which the author unintentionally gets feelzy about Ben’s family as part of this prompt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-23
Updated: 2018-02-23
Packaged: 2019-03-20 15:40:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,725
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13720785
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crossingwinter/pseuds/crossingwinter
Summary: Ben stares at the text for a minute before opening up his computer and typing “+7793 area code” into his web search.  Jakku.  Of course he wouldn’t have recognized it.  He confessed himself surprised to know that Jakku even had an area code.  Did people still live in Jakku?





	Kind Stranger

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nymja](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nymja/gifts).



> **Prompt:** Modern!AU that starts with a wrong number texting situation (or similar) and evolves into a long-distance relationship. I'll leave the backgrounds up to you
> 
> * * *
> 
> Hi hello I have no idea how the sciences work this is based on “what I want” + “I asked some friends about vague memories I have from my college years.” Apologies for any “wow that’s…not how that works…” that you might encounter.
> 
>  
> 
> I am blatantly—if lovingly—ripping off [Kyriadamorte](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Kyriadamorte)’s idea that Alderaan’s surviving population becomes an in-universe stand-in for diaspora Jewry. So I made up a Pesach like holiday because I could and because I wanted to.
> 
>  
> 
> Thanks to [V](thereminnsonata.tumblr.com) and [mneme](mnemehoshiko.tumblr.com) for helping out with this!

He gets a text from a number he does not recognize at nine o’clock at night, when he’s still staring at specs on his computer even though everyone else has long made their way home.

_BB’s balance seems to be off and I can’t get it to right itself.  I know you’re busy but it’s super distressed and won’t sit still long enough for me to try and figure out what’s wrong._

Ben stares at the text for a minute before opening up his computer and typing “+7793 area code” into his web search.  Jakku.  Of course he wouldn’t have recognized it.  He confessed himself surprised to know that Jakku even _had_ an area code.  Did people still live in Jakku?

_I think you have the wrong number_

The response is immediate.

_Oh.  Sorry about that.  Have a good evening._

Maybe it’s because the mystery texter had wished him a good evening when no one else in the lab had on their way out the door, or maybe it’s because it’s late, he’s tired and when it’s late and he’s tired he sometimes lapses into being an almost passable human being, he types out,

_What kind of BB unit are you working with?  We have three in the lab._

_Series 8 I think.  I don’t know where the owner’s manual is._

Kylo pulls up a manual on his screen and reads through it quickly.  If whoever’s texting him doesn’t have the owner’s manual on them, that’ll make it hard to troubleshoot, he thinks idly.  He finds himself glad to not be staring at specs anymore.

_Any idea what the serial on that selenium drive is?_

A pause, then,

_Z349ABB8_

Kylo throws the first three characters into his web search with _BB unit selenium drive problem._  He gets a series of results which he scans through, before finding the one that looks right.

_You’ll need to restart the droid.  Without actually being there, I can’t tell if this is the problem, but it might be that one of the red wires that connects the drive to the wireless comm sector might have come loose._

_Trying now._

While he waits, he opens a few other forum posts about similar problems idly reading through various lab technicians who are very frustrated with _how much money_ they paid for their BB unit and now _this_ before considering that sometimes, pieces of technology can just get wired weirdly.  He hopes on behalf of the stranger that this solves the problem.  The others look nasty.

_It worked!  Thank you, kind stranger!_

Kylo stares at his phone, blinking at the words.

_I don’t think anyone’s ever called me kind before._

_Well, I’m bugging you on a Wednesday night and you helped me fix the BB unit.  It’s very relieved to be rolling properly again.  So again, thank you, kind stranger._

Kylo half-smiles at his phone, despite himself.  He really _must_ be tired if he’s smiling at someone calling him kind, impervious to his attempts to dissuade them otherwise.   _Guess it helps that they don’t know me in person,_ he thinks bleakley before replying.  Because he’s tired, he remembers the ashen color of his father’s face as he’d clutched at his arm.  He does his best to shove that thought away though, just like every other part of him that he’d tried to leave behind when he’d moved here.

_Sure thing._

Then, because the stranger had texted the same to him, he adds,

_Have a good evening._

* * *

It’s probably because Hux is trying to take credit for the work he’d stayed late to complete— _again_ —that Kylo texts the stranger again.

_How’s your BB doing?_

_It’s rolling along splendidly.  Thanks so much for your help last night._

_No problem._

And then, because he can’t help it, because he really can’t help it, he asks,

_Are you in a lab?  Or did some person you know just drop several thousand credits on a BB unit?_

_Kinda both?  BB-8 belongs to my PI, but it’s sort of our lab mascot.  He’s out of town this week with his partner and most people are home for vacation so it’s just me and then it started rolling too far to the left and knocking things over._

_What do you study?_

_Mechanical engineering.  You?  I’m assuming you’re in a lab too._

_An industry one, yeah.  Aeronautical._

_Nice._

It stops there for a little while, and Kylo turns to Phasma’s specs because he’d somehow gotten himself into proofreading them for her while she and Hux did whatever it was that she and Hux did when he got landed with more work.  He’d tried complaining to Snoke about it once, but Snoke had said that it was “to his benefit to do the work” and that “it would pay off long term because it would give him more practice,” and that he would “soon run rings around the rest.”  Always soon.  Never now.  Sort of like that promotion that kept getting dangled in front of him but never actually materialized so he lived in entry-level hell, never quite getting his career pushed along because he had stopped after getting his Masters and the people who kept getting pushed ahead were all post docs.

_Undergrad? Grad? Post?_

He suspected the stranger was younger than him, just because they hadn’t hunted down the answer to the BB unit question on their own yesterday.  Although maybe they weren’t that smart.  He’d heard things about rural schools, and Jakku was about as rural as it gets.

_Undergrad._

He nods to himself.  Then he swallows.  This kid—whoever they are—seems like a decent enough person.  And it’s probably because he’s in a bitter mood—with Snoke, with Hux, with the fact that he’s had the same job and no promotion for nearly five years now that he begins to type.

_If you keep going after undergrad, pick your program carefully.  There are some bullshit ones out there.  And if you’re ever tempted to leave, explore your options before you set yourself to a grad degree, don’t do it.  It’s harder to get back into academia than it is to get out of it.  There’ll always be some company happy to snap you up when you have an advanced degree._

_My advisor keeps saying the same thing._

_Good.  Sounds like he’s got a head on his shoulders._

_What makes you say my advisor’s a he?_

That makes him blink.  While he hadn’t necessarily formally thought the mystery texter was a man, he hadn’t thought that they might be a girl either.  Gender had not crossed his mind at all—but the only person he’s ever heard push back on gender in engineering, _ever_ , is Phasma.  Which makes him wonder if the person who texted him last night might be a girl.  Or someone with more modern views on the gender binary which he still has trouble wrapping his head around sometimes.

_Numerical assumption.  Was I off the mark on that front?_

_No.  He’s a guy._

_I’m not, though, and let me just say that it sucks that everyone assumes that I am because I have a gender neutral name.  I’m like 90% sure that I got my scholarship because they took one look at my application and thought I was some poor self-educated dude who needed to be rescued from my poor bumpkin background._

_I imagine that gets tiresome._

_It does.  Casual sexism in the sciences is really fucking annoying._

_The way my mother talks about it, it’s pandemic in academia period._

He freezes as his thumb hits the send button and he stares at the words _my mother_ glowing at him from his screen.

He hasn’t spoken to Leia Organa in ages.  He hadn’t even gone to his dad’s funeral, hadn’t been able to bear the memory of Han Solo’s ashen face even if he knew that his mother would want him there, wouldn’t blame him for it.  He deletes most of her emails without reading them, and tries not to think of her on a regular basis.  His throat grows thick as he stares at the words and imagines his mom the way he’d seen her as a kid, sitting in her office, chatting with undergrads, walking through the quad holding his hand tightly so that he didn’t run off chasing squirrels.  The last email he’d actually read from her had been an angry one— _Snoke’s jerking you around, Ben.  He is.  You don’t want this and you’re gonna get stuck in limbo, and—_ and she hadn’t been wrong.  He hates that.  He hates that more than he hates _still_ having to proof Phasma’s specs.  

_She’s in academia?  What field?_

Kylo swallows.  He can’t not reply.

_Polisci._

He leaves it there.  He doesn’t need to go into his uncle, and being a faculty brat, and living and breathing universities and getting the rug ripped out from under him before he’d started his PhD and how Snoke had come along at just the right time with just the right kind of interesting job offer to lure him away from the program search and how he knows how much progress he’s made in the past few years, knows what he’s learned, what he’s mastered even, but how he has nothing to show for it, how he’d not even published his work under his own name so that even if he were to apply to programs, his transcripts would read _Ben Solo_ and his professional supplementary materials would read _Kylo Ren_ —a name that wasn’t technically, legally his.

His mom had known all this, had predicted it all, and his uncle—

His nostrils flare as he thinks of his uncle.

_Oh, cool!  I had to take some to fill my interdisciplinary requirements.  Didn’t do too well haha but they were interesting all the same._

He’s frustrated now, can feel his own stress rising as he stares at the words.  There’s a reason he never thinks about his family and that reason is that he feels like an angry teen every time he does, wanting to break windows and throw computers through walls because he’s not a child anymore he’s a grown-ass adult who can make his own choices why do they keep talking to him like he’s a child?  When they didn’t even pay attention to him when he was an actual child?

He takes a deep breath.  He’s not going to take it out on her.  He’s not.

Not when she’s the only person who’s been genuinely _nice_ to him in…well, in recent memory.

_Yeah.  Interesting stuff._

_What’s your name, by the way?_

_Rey._

_I see why engineers would think you’re a dude._

_Thanks.  I got that far on my own._

Kylo imagines that she’s gotten as far as she’s gotten entirely on her own.  He suspects she’s got nerves of steel like Phasma, and a simultaneously high and low tolerance for bullshit.

_You?_

Maybe it’s because they’d just been talking about his mom but it’s not until much later that he even realizes that he had replied to that question with _Ben_ and not Kylo.

* * *

Any regret that he has about giving her his actual name rather than the one he’s been published under evaporates when he caves later that week and searches for her on the web.

_rey jakku mechanical engineering_

And of course she’s in his uncle’s program.  Of course she’s at the university he’d grown up on.  Of course the owner of that BB unit is Poe Dameron, who he used to get into bike races down 4th Street with after school because they had grown up next door to one another.

Of course she’s cute—her hair pulled back in a pony-tail, her eyes shining and hazel colored in the picture they have of her on the department website.  She’s wearing a sweatshirt that’s about as ratty as they come.  In another photo, she’s wearing protective goggles and is wielding a welder and his pants start to feel uncomfortably tight until he notices his uncle in the background of the photograph and closes the tab.

No, it’s probably good she can’t look him up by name.  There are hundreds of Bens working at the First Order alone, and he’s the only Kylo.  There’s no way she’d find him by searching the web, and would have to be a web search whiz to hunt him down based on whatever his uncle might have let slip.

For some reason, that makes him sad.

He doesn’t dwell on it for too long, though.  Maybe because they keep texting.  Not consistently—at least not initially—but when Hux is back on his bullshit, Ben will send Rey a text because Rey will understand without having to give her too much context.  It makes him understand more what his mother had meant when he’d been in undergrad about making sure he had friends who weren’t all in the same circles of acquaintances…as if he’d ever been particularly good at having friends to begin with.  Rey doesn’t have to know the details of his day to day—in fact the beauty of her seems to be that she seems to care about him independently of the work he’s doing.  And that—well, he can count on less than one hand the number of people in his life who’ve been like that.

_There’s this new junior in our lab this semester and he keeps talking over me and I want to strangle him._

_I think you should.  He deserves it._

_I mean he probably doesn’t._

_Nah.  If he’s rude to you he deserves it._

_You’re a bad influence._

_This is more in line with what I’ve been told throughout my life._

_Part of why I was so resistant to the “kind stranger” thing from our first chain._

_In all seriousness, though, while I don’t necessarily recommend strangulation, I am sorry that this is happening.  Can you talk to him about it?_

_He’s super insecure because he’s new and I’ve been in the lab since Freshman year._

_But yeah—I should talk to him.  I guess that’s the responsible thing to do._

_I retract the suggestion.  I don’t ever make the responsible suggestion._

_You should categorically never follow my advice.  I’m bad at making decisions._

_Maybe I’m the bad influence, then.  Turning you into the kind stranger._

_Maybe you are._

Maybe she is.

Days that she texts him put a spring in his step, make him leave early even when he’s not quite done with his work—hell, even smile into Hux’s pompous sneer.  Who gives a shit what Hux thinks of him, when he’s got Rey telling him that she’s the bad influence in his life and not the other way around.

 _Try that one on for size, Uncle Luke,_ he thinks bitterly as he’s trying to fall asleep.

* * *

It’s as he’s coming out of a particularly frustrating lab meeting that he gets a text from Rey.

_Can I call you?  Not right now but later?_

It’s enough to put the entire thing out of his mind as he stares at his phone.

_Yeah.  Anytime._

_Probably in the evening if that’s ok._

_Sure.  I’ll be here._

His heart is hammering in his throat for about twelve different reasons as he sits down with his laptop at his desk to work on some redesigns that Snoke has pushed off onto him so that he can finish preparing for a conference he’s going to—without Kylo—at the end of the week.  He can barely read because he’s thinking too hard about Rey.

She wants to talk to him.  He’s going to hear her voice.  He’s going to hear her voice and it’s going to be real—this girl he started texting because of Poe Dameron’s BB Unit is going to speak to him.  And he’s going to speak to her.

Then the rest of his brain catches up with his own excitement.   _Something’s wrong,_ he thinks, and his chest constricts oddly.   _Something’s wrong, and she’s reaching out to me?  Why?_

She has friends, doesn’t she?  She’s texted him about them over the past few months—getting drinks with Finn, or going to Rose’s a cappella concert.  Why _him?_  She doesn’t know him.  She can’t know him.  Can’t know him the way he knows her.

“Ren?” comes Snoke’s voice and Ben sits bolt upright.  He hadn’t realized how much he’d been slouching in his chair.

“What’s up?” he asks, doing his best to sound casual, but he’s sure he’s not pulling that off properly.

“I wanted to give you an update on our eternal situation,” Snoke tells him, resting a hand on his shoulder.

“Yeah,” Kylo says.  Snoke’s hand is still on his shoulder and he knows what that means.  He knows it even before Snoke’s thumb begins running over his shoulder blade.

“I just can’t offer you a promotion just yet.  Not until finance gives me funding for two more full-time heads.”

“Two more?” Kylo asks, frowning.

“It’s complicated,” Snoke strokes into his shoulder as if trying to calm him.  It’s setting his teeth on edge.  “We have one new head, but it’s likely going to be an external search.  We need someone with a little more experience—managerial experience, this time, but a degree wouldn’t hurt and you’ve only been in the industry for five years so you’re not quite at the right level for the position.  We want to keep the blood fresh and the lab competitive.  So we’ll have to wait a little longer and—”

Kylo jerks his chair around and turns back to his computer, his heart thumping.  He wants to yell.  How long is Snoke going to keep him on a leash like this?  How long?  Is he going to be forty and still sitting at this same desk?  Fifty?  Ninety?  

“It’ll happen soon,” Snoke tells him—lies to him, since he’d just told him finance had only given him one new position and he wasn’t going to use it on Ben, and Ben’s been here long enough to know that finance doesn’t just bestow new positions upon request.

 _He’s jerking you around, Ben,_ his mother had written him.

“We’ll talk about it more when you…calm down,” Snoke says and Ben hears him move away, shuffling in the slippers he wears around the lab even though they violate safety protocols because his feet and back require non-standard footwear.

He wants to cry.  He wants to punch a wall. He wants to scream at his uncle for pushing him to this.

But more than either of those things, he wants to talk to Rey.

* * *

He’s walking home from work around eight when his phone starts ringing in his pocket.

“Hello?”

“Hey.”

Her voice is quiet, nervous and the sound of it makes the world around him still.

“What’s going on?” he asks, noticing how his own voice sounds a little throatier, a little lower.  He’s not used to talking to people on the phone.  He hasn’t called his mom in ages, and when he talks to Hux or Phasma not in lab, they text.  He hears enough of both of their voices as is.  Snoke’s the only person he’s ever really had phone conversations with whenever he’s at conferences, and Ben doesn’t want to think about Snoke right now.

“Hang on,” she says and he hears the sound of a door clicking shut.  Is she at lab?  Or maybe in a dorm room, not wanting anyone to overhear what’s going on.  She’s quiet for a moment, and then she says.  “I am having trouble with my advisor.”  She sounds thoroughly miserable and he can feel his hand tighten around his phone.  Had Luke done something to her?  Had he been an asshole in some new, unprecedented way?

He can’t tell if he’s grateful to have his head full of his uncle, rather than Snoke, when he asks again, “What’s going on?”

“So, I’m starting to think about grad programs,” she tells him.  “Like—I want to keep studying.  And I went in to talk to him about what programs might be a good fit for me.  And like you said—I should pick a program carefully.  And I want to.  And I will.  I didn’t really have much of a choice for undergrad because New Galactic was the only school that gave me a full ride so that was gonna be that.  But I might have options for grad school.”  She’s breathing hard, and it sounds like she’s trying not to cry, and Ben’s mind is full of that smiling picture of her from the university website, the one that’s got her glowing hazel eyes and her ratty sweatshirt.  “So I was talking to Luke—my advisor—about it, and he was going on about all the things that I should take into account, and they’re all things that exist at New Galactic but the second I asked whether he thought I could stay on for grad school he—”

“He told you he wouldn’t support your studies.”

Ben knows it all too well.  He remembers it all too well, feeling as though the rug had been ripped out of him, realizing that maybe his uncle couldn’t stand to be around him at all.

“Yeah,” Rey says and she’s definitely crying now.  “Yeah.  And like.  I know it’s dumb.  And he has good reasons for it.  Like I should expand my horizons, and build relationships elsewhere and—and all that.  But I just feel…I don’t know.”  She’s breathing hard, and Ben fumbles in his pocket for the key to his house and lets himself in.  “He’s been a mentor to me.  And I don’t really have mentors—never have.  And it just feels like…like…”

“Like you’re worthless,” Ben says, thinking of both Snoke and his uncle with a bitterness he’d never associated to both at once before.  “Like all that work that you put in to build a relationship with them means nothing to him at all.”

“Yeah.”  Rey is sobbing now and Ben drops himself onto his couch.

“Do you have a phone that facetimes?” he asks.

She doesn’t respond immediately.  “Yeah,” she says.  “Yeah just a sec.”

He pulls his phone away from his ear, rests it against his knees.  A moment later she’s there.  Her eyes are red and puffy, and her hair is down now, and her lip starts to tremble when she looks at him.  “Sorry,” she mumbles as though embarrassed.  “I just…I can’t talk about it at lab.  It hurts too much and they’ll all,” she waggles her head from side to side as though trying to indicate something he should understand.  And he does.

“They won’t believe you.  Or they’ll tell you he was right to do it, and that you were wrong to expect this of him.  Or that it’s good to get pushed out of the nest, or some other bullshit that means they can look him in the face and still like him tomorrow even though he’s made you cry.”

She nods, and her voice is so wet when she says.  “I feel so alone.”

“You’re not alone,” he says forcefully and—to his own surprise—not angrily.

“I am though,” she whispers.

“You have your friends,” he says.  “Finn, and Rose, and I bet Dameron would try and help.”  Poe was always trying to help, and he can’t fathom Poe having grown out of that over the years.

Rey blinks.  “How’d you know…I don’t think I ever mentioned Poe.”  Ben feels his own face heat up, as she cocks her head.  “Did you look me up?”

He doesn’t see the point of even trying to lie.  “Yeah,” he says.  “Yeah, I did.”

He waits for…he’s not sure what.  For her to cry, to yell, to tell him he’s a creep or something.  “I suppose under other circumstances I’d be weirded out, but right now I just…” she looks at him miserably.

“You’re not alone,” he tells her again.  “Bad advisors are terrible.  And if this is something that makes Luke a bad advisor, then better to be shut of him before you’re in too deep.  That’s…” He swallows and he can practically see his dad’s face right now.  It hadn’t been the shove that had killed him, but the heart attack that he’d had as he’d tried to get up… Snoke had told him it wasn’t his fault, his mom had told him that it wasn’t his fault, but he’d seen he bitter blame in his uncle’s eyes that his best friend was dead and it was because Ben had shoved him.  He shakes his head like a dog trying to rid wet fur of water. He doesn’t want to think about his dad—not now, not ever. “That’s where I am now.  Kind of.”

She looks at him and he sees the question in her puffy red eyes.   _I should tell her,_ he thinks.   _The whole thing.  I should._ The words lodge in his throat.  Some of it needs to stay dead.  But not the part that’ll make her understand.

“Skywalker was my advisor too.  In undergrad, and for my master’s degree.”

Rey inhales sharply.  “He was?”

Ben nods.  “He did the same shit to me.  Except I mean it when I say that I’m not a good person, and I could see that he thought as much in his eyes.  I don’t think it was him trying to broaden my horizons.  I think it was him trying to get rid of me.”

Rey blinks as though she doesn’t understand.  Ben’s glad of that.  It makes it easier to be angry at his uncle—if Rey doesn’t understand how he can think that.

“Anyway,” Ben says.  “That’s how I ended up at my job.  And my boss was very encouraging all the way through my transition out of academia.  But…” he shakes his head.  “He keeps promising me a promotion I’m never going to get.  He keeps acting as though it’s going to happen, keeps saying that next year, next year, next year, while I am stuck even though I’m working really hard and I’ve grown a lot and I just have nothing to show for it, and I wish that I’d never left academia, but all my work’s in a different name now—as if it weren’t hard enough to going from industry back into a program.  He’s never pushing me forward unless it directly benefits him.  He’s using me.”  His voice cracks embarrassingly but god if it doesn’t feel good to admit it.  To say it to someone who won’t rub it in his face how wrong he was, how he had misjudged Snoke like he’d misjudged everything he’d ever done in his life.  “And I don’t know how to get out of it.  And I don’t think anyone cares.”  He’d be embarrassed if it weren’t for the way that Rey’s looking at him out of the screen of his phone.

“You’re not alone either,” she whispered to him.  “I promise.  I care, Ben.”  And he can see in her eyes that somehow, unexpectedly, she does.

* * *

Ben is late to work the next morning.  He and Rey had facetimed for a good three hours the night before.  They’d talked about her school, about his work, about life.  He’d learned that she didn’t have parents.  She’d learned that he’d led to his father’s death, and he hadn’t been able to look at his mother in the face ever since.

He feels as though he’s a child who’d spent hours crying, though he hadn’t cried at all the night before.  He’d come close.  He had come very close, when talking about his father, and about his mother.  But he had managed not to cry.

“ _You should call her—your mom,_ ” Rey had told him after they’d sat in silence for a few minutes.  “ _You have a mom to call.  You should._ ”

And somehow he’d found himself telling her he would.

He spends the morning in testing, watching as Hux’s demos go a little awry because he’d messed up some calculation or other.  He works a bit on the redesigns that Snoke had given him yesterday before he takes a deep breath and opens the blank email he started to Leia Organa the night before and which he still doesn’t know what to say in.  Nothing seems to fit.  There aren’t words.

Vividly, he wishes he hadn’t deleted all the emails she’d sent him since dad had died.

But it’s as though the stars are aligning, as though somehow, incredibly, his mother had known that he was trying to think of words to say and, as she’d always done—even when he hadn’t wanted it—tried to help.

_To: kren@holo.net_

_From: leia.organa@newgalactic.edu_

_Subject: Shelor_

_I imagine you won’t, but I will never not ask: would you like to come for Shelor next month.  I’m getting together a guest list for a first night seder and there’s a spot for you if you want it._

_Love you even when you’re silent,_

_Mom_

Ben stares at the words, can hear his mother saying them, can see her rolling her eyes as she doesn’t bother trying not to be passive aggressive, can see her smiling gently to take the sting out of the words to try because she knows as much as he knows that sometimes the snark is just strong in their family.

He swallows and thinks of Rey.  With a lurch in his stomach, he realizes that if he goes home for Shelor, he’ll likely be there for a few days—would be able to see her in person, if she wanted that.

He feels a little guilty—which he figures is not off-alignment with the holiday experience—as he hits reply for the first time in years.

_To: leia.organa@newgalactic.edu_

_From: kren@holo.net_

_Subject: Re: Shelor_

_I’d like that, if it’s not a burden._

Then, breathing shakily, he adds,

_I’ve been trying to figure out what to say to you.  I know I’ve been absent.  I know that’s probably hurt you.  I’m sorry._

He hits send because that’s as much as he can handle typing out and he sits there for a long while before shaking himself and turning to his own projects.

* * *

_I’m going to be home for a part of Shelor this year_

He texts Rey as soon as he and his mom have finalized the plan via email.

 _I’d want to call you about it,_ Leia Organa had written, _But honestly I want to see your face when I talk to you for the first time about anything substantial, so let’s keep this business-as-usual (minus the you ghosting me for several years) until you’re home._

He had agreed to that with, though he hadn’t apologized.  His mother sometimes got angrier when you apologized too much, and he’d rather look her in the face when he did it so he could read her reaction.  Business-as-usual she’d requested, so business-as-usual she’d get.

_That’s exciting!! So that means you’ll be here?_

_Yeah.  For about five days.  Taking the week off here._

_I didn’t realize you were Alderaanian._

_Yeah, on my mom’s side._

_Cool!_

_If you have time while you’re here—and I know you’re coming to patch things up with your mom—I’d like to see you._

His throat constricts that she’d asked first.  He’d been going to, but had been trying to figure out how not to.  Probably because he’d actually talked to her, he is now more acutely aware that she is still an undergrad—if one that is nearly done with her degree—and he’s probably about ten years older than she is.  It’s what he tells himself when he feels his own heart beat faster when she texts him, or when he finds himself passively imagining the wet smile she’d given him when they’d facetimed.

_I’d like that._

Simple and to the point and his heart is hammering in his chest as though he’d just run a mile.

* * *

 

_If I’ve been invited to my first Shelor, what should I be aware of going in?_

He gets the text at the airport, right as boarding the plane that will take him back to D’Qar for the first time in years.  He smiles at it.

_You’ll have about four cups of wine on an empty stomach and food won’t appear until about 2 hours in._

_If you don’t want to be too drunk, you should eat something beforehand._

_Is it rude not to drink the wine?  It’s still a school night for me and I’ll have lab at 9 the next day._

_Usually there’s a grape juice option._

_Phew._

_Powering down now.  See you soon?_

_Yeah!  Let me know what your time looks like.  Safe flight and I hope things are ok with your mom._

His stomach lurches and he opens a blank text window.  He hasn’t texted his mom since he’d gotten his new phone.  He hadn’t texted her with the last one, either.

_Boarding.  See you soon._

He shuts his phone off before he can wait to see how fast Leia replies.

He gets off the plane two hours later and makes his way through the airport.  He turns on his phone as he stands on the escalator down to baggage claim and ground transportation and immediately his phone vibrates with words from his mom.

_Text me when you reach ground transportation.  I’ll be in the cell lot.  New car—blue sedan._

_Here._

_Driving over._

He shivers as he waits just outside and he sees the blue sedan and her hair’s different but he’d recognize the way she carries herself behind the wheel of a car anywhere; it’s like when she came to pick him up from robotics club after middle school.

He opens the door to the second seat and drops his backpack and dufflebag onto it, and he hears her open the door on her side of the car.  She’s standing behind him when he closes the second seat and turns to face her.

“Hi mom,” he whispers, and bends to hug her.

* * *

 

They don’t speak until she’s pulled out onto the highway, until they’re going seventy miles an hour towards the house he’d grown up in, the house he’d argued with his parents in, the house he had built his first computer in, the house he’d fought with his father in, and shoved him a little too hard, and the heart attack had killed him, but Ben had probably caused the heart attack.

“What changed?” his mom asks, her eyes firmly on the road, and Ben swallows.  When he doesn’t answer immediately, she goes on.  “Five years of nothing, and then suddenly you’re coming home for the holidays.  And I’m not saying I’m not thrilled that you’re here—because I am—but it hurts Ben.  It hurts a lot.”

“Yeah,” he mumbles, feeling like a kid again.  “Yeah, I know.”  He chews on the words for a moment—he’d prepared them, but preparing to say them when you’re in your bathroom shaving in the morning is very different from being in the car with your mom for the first time in years.  “I don’t really know,” he says.  “I mean—there are a lot of little things.  And they all kind of built up together.  And this…this person I’ve been making friends with—” He pauses without meaning to.  That feels wrong as an introduction to Rey.  Making friends doesn’t quite encapsulate what she means to him.  But he tables that.  If this conversation isn’t a catastrophe, maybe he’ll be able to clarify later.  “She sort of pushed me towards realizing a lot of stuff.”

Leia waits, or maybe she’s processing.  He’s never known his mother to be at a loss for words, and he can’t fathom that she is now.  So he steels himself and continues.  “Stuff like how you were right and Snoke was taking advantage of me.  Stuff like how I’ve fucked myself over in terms of my career by publishing under a different name.  Stuff like how this wasn’t going to be what I wanted, no matter how upset I was with everything that was happening.  Stuff like…I don’t know.  A lot of stuff.”  He keeps saying the word stuff.  He’d been so much more articulate this morning.  He’d had a whole list of things to say, each had gone on for miles.

“Well that’s something,” Leia says, her voice so very guarded.  “That’s progress.  I’m glad your friend has been helping you through that.”

“Yeah.  Me too.”

He thinks of Rey, thinks of her tears and her smiles, thinks of her loneliness and how she didn’t have any parents at all, anyone to love her, anyone to pick her up at the airport even if she hadn’t spoken to them in years.  “I know I hurt you.  And I’m sorry.”

He hears his mother’s sharp intake of breath, sees her knuckles tighten on the steering wheel of the car.  Were she not driving, he’s sure she’d close her eyes.

“I imagine we’re going to spend a lot of time talking over the course of this week,” Leia says slowly.  “And I’m not going to lie, Ben, I’ve been so angry with you sometimes I can barely speak.  And then,” she lets out a bitter laugh, “it always makes me think of your father and some dumb quip he’d come up with about shutting up my smart mouth.  Which of course only makes the whole thing hurt more.  Losing both of you like that so fast.  One-two punch.”

Ben bites the inside of his lip, and he’s watching her now, watching the way she’s determinedly not looking at him even though the road is straight and at this time of day she could easily cast a glance in his direction.  Her hair is greyer than it was when he’d last seen her, and there are more wrinkles around her eyes.  She’s not wearing any makeup right now and he can’t believe his mom actually looks like she’s getting old.

“But it’s Shelor,” she says, her voice shaking.  “And deeds speak louder than words, and you’re here.  And you just began to apologize.  So we’ll start there and see where it goes.”

“Yeah,” he agrees breathily.  “We’ll see where it goes.”

* * *

He spends the afternoon helping her in the kitchen.  “I suppose the benefit of you feeling guilty about all this is you actually are helping with holiday preparations,” Leia manages to joke, which puts a smile on his face.  Joking on the first day is a good sign, right?  She’s having sixteen people over for dinner that night.  “Luke’s coming, so you behave yourself.”

“I will if he does,” Ben growls before he can stop himself.

“I’ve told him to behave too.  Both of you will behave.  I don’t want a knock-down-drag-out in front of my students, thanks.  You’re sitting at opposite ends of the table, so that should be enough to be getting on with.”

Ben takes a deep breath.  “How many students are gonna be here?”

“I have my three advisees coming, as well as the chair of my department, her wife.  Amilyn’s coming too, so you’ll want to behave yourself if you want to get into her good graces again.  And Luke’s bringing some people from his lab, so you’ll have strangers you can talk to in whatever language you science types speak.”

Ben’s stomach bottoms out.  Some people from Luke’s lab could very well include Rey.  It might not—Luke’s lab is a big one.  But somehow, in his gut, he knows that she’ll be there.

* * *

She is.  She arrives not too early and not too late, and she goes still when she sees him sitting in the living room uncomfortably trying to make small talk with Amilyn Holdo, whose steely gaze is remarkably unforgiving for all the grief he’d caused his mother in the past few years.

But before he can figure out how to excuse himself without offending Amilyn, Luke, whom he has been determinedly ignoring, calls out, “Rey!” and waves her over to where he’s sitting across the room from Ben.  Ben’s eyes follow Rey as she weaves her way through several chairs to sit next to his uncle.  She keeps giving him furtive looks between whatever it is that Luke’s saying to her.

With great effort, Ben turns back to Amilyn.  She’s watching him closely.

“You’re too old for coeds, Ben,” she says sternly and Ben feels his ears heating up.

“No—I just—” he begins, and watches as Amilyn’s eyebrows shoot up.  Why is it that he’s felt like he’s twelve years old again ever since he got off the airplane?  “I know her is all.”

His phone buzzes and he looks down at it.

_I didn’t make the connection that it might be the one you’re at_

_Why didn’t I make that connection?_

He can practically feel the disapproval rolling off Amilyn that he’s checking his phone right when they’re talking, but he doesn’t care.  Rey matters more than whatever Amilyn thinks.  He wouldn’t be here at all if it weren’t for Rey.

_To be fair I didn’t either_

He stares at his phone as though hoping she’ll text him again, but when she doesn’t he looks back up.  Amilyn is watching him, eyes narrowed.

But before she can say anything, his mom’s clapping her hands and inviting them all into the dining room for the start of the seder and Ben gets to his feet.  He’s going to sit as far away from Amilyn as possible, he decides.  He hopes she sits near Luke so he can kill two birds with one stone.

“Hey.”  Rey is standing there, looking up at him and everything around him falls away.  She’s real.  She’s here and she’s real.  And any discomfort he’d been anticipating from sitting through what’s about to happen has vanished because Rey’s really here.

He swallows, and she swallows too.  Then they sit down next to one another.

* * *

It’s just past midnight when Leia yawns and says to Ben, “Lock up when she leaves?”

Somehow over the course of the past six hours, the room of sixteen people has faded to be just the two of them, Rey with her knees tucked up against her chin in the chair that his father had used to sit in and Ben sprawled across the couch.

“Yeah,” Ben says, and Leia glances between the two of them before shrugging and climbing the stairs for bed.

Rey watches her go.  “Is she glad you’re here?”

“As glad as she can be,” he mumbles.  “So yeah.  I guess.”  He can say it to Rey because it’s Rey.  “It’s gonna take a while.”

She gets up from the chair and a moment later she’s come to sit on the couch next to him, resting her head on his shoulder.  His breath hitches at the contact.  She’s so warm next to him—he’d never really imagined that.  He can feel her breathing.

“It helps that she was right about some things,” he babbles.  “Like Snoke.  Like my work.  It’s easier to talk to her about that than the tougher stuff, but it’s a start.  It’s all a start.”  He feels as though his voice is getting higher just because Rey is close to him.  Her head is on his shoulder and he doesn’t know what to do.  No one’s ever put their head on his shoulder before.  “And I think,” he soldiers on, “I think I’m going to try and find some PhD program.  Or at least a new job.  Or something.  I don’t know.  She thinks I’ll be happier doing a PhD, and I think she’s right, but that’ll be hard to do and—”

Her hand finds his and squeezes it and his mind goes completely blank.

“If,” Rey says quietly, before clearing her throat.  “If you’re really going to look for a PhD program, we should look together.”  He turns to look at her and her face is so damn close to his, resting on his shoulder like that.  She’s looking determined.  “It might make the searching less painful.  I know I’ll be less scared if I’m not completely alone again.”  She pauses.  “I want to.  I like you, Ben.  And I want to be where you are, if I’m getting pushed out of the nest.”

He can think of any number of reasons why this is a bad idea, including but not limited to the fact that getting his hopes up about this will only lead to heartbreak, that he might be misinterpreting her suggestion when immediately his mind leaps to the assumption that it’s one that’s more than just friendly, that he’s ten years older than she is and he’s only just now starting to unravel the mistakes that he’s made in his life and that she shouldn’t be burdened with that, and that the odds of them finding a program together are slim to none.

 _Never tell me the odds,_ he hears his father sniping in his mind.

Maybe that’s why he hears himself saying, “Yeah.  Yeah I’d like that.”

“Yeah?” Rey asks.

“Yeah,” he says, and her eyes blaze at his, and for one moment he sees the future there, the two of them curled up on a couch together, walking through campus together, complaining about lab together, and his eyes prickle with tears.

She tilts her face upwards to kiss him.  Her lips are soft and he’s never been kissed before so he has no idea if it’s a good kiss in terms of technique, but it’s the best kiss he’ll ever have because it’s him and Rey.

He squeezes her hand and she squeezes back and for one glorious moment, Ben’s hopeful for the future.

* * *

_Text me when you land?_

_Nah.  I was just gonna leave you hanging.  It was nice knowing you and everything._

 

_Nice knowing you too.  Have a good life._

_Thanks.  With my luck, I probably won't._

She's the first person he texts when the captain instructs them that it's safe to take their phones off airplane mode, and even as he's typing,

_Safely landed_

a text from Rey pops up on his screen.

_Miss you already.  I'm glad we're doing this._

He smiles as he types out,

_Yeah.  Me too._

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! You can find me [here](http://crossingwinter.tumblr.com/reylo) on tumblr.


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